For a long time, as I would regularly mention on the blog, I loathed tattoos. I’ve come around to the idea in recent months that they can, if well done and imaginative, tell a person’s story very well.

This doesn’t mean I’m intending to get one myself in real life (or Second Life) just that they can be quite good in certain circumstances.

There’s also an awful lot of dumb ones out there!

I even had a go at creating some in SL myself, which was an interesting experiment. It’s not something I’ll be going into 🙂 but I enjoyed the act of creation within SL.

Down to business…

Howie, who bankrolls these pages, moved to Spain a couple of years ago. It’s with regret that I have to tell you that his partner, Linda, has recently been diagnosed with cancer. So I’m throwing the board open for Howie to give you some info…

Hi! Listen up folks. I retired and moved to Spain a couple of years ago, and the idea was that my partner, Linda, and I would see out our days here in the sun. I’m still hopeful that will be the case, but she’s recently been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and a (hopefully) brief back to the UK is required for her to receive treatment. (I should point out we could get treatment here in Spain, but the UK, in terms of speed, seems our best option right now).

Listen. If any of you have any abnormalities in life, health wise, I advise you get it attended to immediately. My partner, Linda, has had some issues recently which I’m delighted to say were treated with the utmost urgency by the Spanish health authorities. It looks like cervical cancer, and we’ll know better within the next couple of weeks, and it’s certainly survivable, but it’s no less a shock to realise how fragile life is.

I’ve added a cancer pink ribbon to my avi for now, to highlight the issue. Of course I hope my much loved partner (an SL user herself, on my encouragement) gets well again. But it’s still important to highlight and promote the dangers of various cancers in men and women.

I’ve handed ‘the bank account’ over to Ella in regards SL, and SLN, as my attentions will be elsewhere. I shall be out of SL for the foreseeable future.

I should add that SLN has, in the time it has been running, lost a valued team member, Harry, to cancer. We’ve also had another staff member, Marlene, endure (and happily survive) breast cancer. Please support, however you can, any cancer charities local to you. It’s important that, even if we can’t find a cure, we improve screening to ensure less people face the problem in future. In real life, and in Second Life, I’d ask you to continue to support cancer charities.

Marlene defiantly wears a post-breast cancer scar tattoo to underscore her real life experiences.

In a sense, the tattoo-free Marlene wore a ‘tattoo’ of sorts in her SL mastectomy scar, to highlight her real life travails. She survives, as far as we know, but is no longer active in SL, and last heard spent her time and energies working for cancer charities.

Howie.

After two weeks of frustration with my mesh body, a problem that had me tearing my hair out, I found a solution. It’s not perfect, but it’ll have to do.

The problem appears to be with the Firestorm viewer. I installed both the Alchemy viewer, and the official Linden Labs one, and both work perfectly. Firestorm has long been my viewer of choice, and it continues to work perfectly well with ‘classic’ avatars, but the instant I put the mesh body on, problems arise. The thing is, I’ve never liked the official viewer, right from the day I learned of third party viewers, and dumped the official one. I simply don’t like the controls layout on it, whereas Firestorm had a more natural ‘feel’ to the layout.

So I’m now on the official one, hating it 🙂 but at least back in SL looking complete. Now, if you’ll forgive me, there’s lost time to be made up 🙂 so I’m off to struggle with the controls, and shall abandon Firestorm until their next update and see if the mesh issue is resolved.

Ella

It rather looks as though the planned WNBR (World Naked Bike Ride) event planned for the English city of Canterbury will not take place this summer, after organisers failed to get insurance for it.

However, reading the article, all is not quite as simple as it might seem.

It looks as though there is an undercurrent of feeling that it ‘stinks of exhibitionism’ and voices saying that participants ‘aren’t regular cyclists’. So what? I don’t think you have to be a regular cyclist to participate such an event to highlight pollution and roads that are unsafe for cyclists.

Conservative councillor Neil Baker, who chairs the council’s community committee, has questioned how genuine the event is. He also argued some of the participants were too large in physical size to be regular cyclists.

“If they were actually regular cyclists making a protest about air pollution issues, they may have a point,” he said on the East Kent Civil Society Facebook page.

“But given the state of some of them, there is no way they are regular cyclists. You can spot a regular cyclist by their calves due to lactic acid build-up. There may be some who join in, but it stinks of exhibitionism to me.”

It rather smells of ‘agenda’ to me.

A previous WNBR event in Canterbury

Ella